Stressful crop weather

Overall, this looks to be a pretty stressful week of weather for a lot of the nation's corn and soybean crops. Temperatures are seen more consistently hot for the heart of the Corn Belt than we have seen so far this year. Plus, no precipitation is expected for much of the same area.

There's the perception right now that the only real dry area of the Corn Belt is in the far northwest, but in reality we will finish this month of July with just a relatively small area of the Corn Belt seeing at least normal July rainfall. That area would encompass mainly the eastern third of Iowa and northwestern Illinois, where places like Mason City, Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, Dubuque and Moline easily have July rainfall totals that are above the 30-year normals.

Otherwise, July was a month featuring below normal rainfall, certainly most severe in the northwestern Corn Belt (probably one of the 15 or 20 driest Julys on record for eastern South Dakota and southwestern Minnesota) but notably dry as well in southeastern Nebraska (about an inch of rain this month at Lincoln), northern Missouri (less than an inch of rain at Kirksville), west-central Illinois (less than an inch of rain at Quincy), southern Michigan (less than an inch of rain at Lansing), and even central Indiana (Indianapolis will record less than half of their normal rainfall this month).

The fact that this month has not been very warm (above normal temperatures so far this month, on average, have been confined to the northwest) has prevented this dryness from getting a lot of notoriety, but that is about to change. 90-degree weather will become pretty common in the Midwest by tomorrow (a few places will make it today), and that could start a string of seven to possibly eight straight days in which the heart of the Corn Belt sees highs above the 90 degree mark.

I talked last week about a shift in the rainfall pattern, one where the driest areas of the Corn Belt will see the better rainfall threats, and that is still the case as the very dry northwestern Corn Belt will start to have rainfall chances by Wednesday night. For the heart of the Corn Belt though (for example, that dry area between Kirksville and Quincy), the next chance for rain may not be until sometime around August 8.

Overall, this looks to be a pretty stressful week of weather for a lot of the nation's corn and soybean crops. Temperatures are seen more consistently hot for the heart of the Corn Belt than we have seen so far this year. Plus, no precipitation is expected for much of the same area.